Catching up on my reading

How about Locked Rooms, the eighth book in author Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell series. Mary -- or Russell, as everyone including her husband calls her -- is a Lost, but she’s no flapper or bootlegger or mobster’s moll. She’s a consulting detective who, with the aforementioned husband, has solved some real corkers. But here, in 1924 San Francisco, she’s thrown into her toughest case yet: the mystery of her parents’ deaths, why she has blocked certain memories of that time, and why someone seems bent on killing her now. King’s Russell books are brilliant evocations of a time when unconventional women were really beginning to make a glorious nuisance of themselves, but what makes them so deliciously geeky is that Russell’s much-older husband is Sherlock Holmes. The Russell books are some of the best examples I’ve ever read of fan fiction in any fictional universe, her Holmes a dramatic extrapolation from Conan Doyle but one that feels, if possible, even richer and more authentic than that of the creator itself. (Other literary characters make surprising and wonderfully portrayed appearances in the Russell books; the seventh installment, The Game, features Kimball O’Hara, aka Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.) Who'd play Mary in the movie? Claire Danes, maybe, or Kirsten Dunst.

Now I’m rereading Nature’s End by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka. I’ve been in an ecological funk since New Orleans was devastated by Katrina, and I wanted to reread Walter J. Williams’s The Rift, which I discussed recently in connection with the disaster, or John Barnes’s Mother of Storms, an SF novel about a superhurricane that holds the United States hostage, but damn if I could find my copies. It was while looking for them that I came across my beat-up paperback of Nature’s End, which scared the bejesus out of me when I first read it back in 1986, when it was published, in the same way that The Day After and Threads did around the same time. Apocalyptic visions were all the rage in the mid 80s -- they’re part of what helped shape Xer cynicism -- and this one is a doozy, a documentary-style tale of the year 2025, when the Earth is gasping for breath, suffocating under too many people and the human-made devastation of the natural world: the rainforests have been burned, the American Midwest is a desert, and choking pollution can kill even healthy adults. Plenty of the fake history between the years of 1986 and today have not come to pass -- there was no "Federal bankruptcy crisis of 1994" -- and much of what Strieber and Kunetka speculate for the next twenty years are not likely to happen, but as with most science fiction, the point isn’t to make accurate predictions but to explore a realm of possibilities. Since I’ve been rereading the novel, I’ve come across two scary genuine headlines that could well have come from its alternative timeline: "Missing lab mice infected with plague" and "Global warming 'past the point of no return'".

Yikes.